Johann Philipp Reis

The work of Reis predated that of Bell and Edison,
and so he may well have invented the first telephone by some definitions. Unfortunately,
due to politics and commercial considerations, he did not receive the credit he
was due during his lifetime.

Reis was born in 1834 in Gelnhausen , a little
town in Germany. His father died early, and Reis was destined to become a farmhand,
but his intelligence was noted by the local schoolmaster. He was sent off instead
to Garnier's Institute in Friedrichsdorf to further his education. He learned
French and English and little other useful knowledge apart from what the school
library offered. When he was fourteen he moved to Hassel's Institute in Frankfort-am-Main.
Here he learned Latin and Italian, this being considered appropriate education
in those days. His interest in science began to show out, but it would not pay
the bills. An uncle apprenticed him into the "colour trade".

Reis
continued to study in his own time, and took private lessons in mathematics and
physics. He also attended the lectures on Mechanics run by Professor Bottger at
the local Trade School. When his apprenticeship ended he moved to Frankfurt to
Dr Poppe's Institute. He privately taught other students Geography, which was
not taught at the school, and found he enjoyed teaching. He also found the time
to join the Physical Society of Frankfurt.

His first paper, "On The
Radiation Of Electricity", was submitted to the Annalen Der Physik journal
in 1859. It was rejected, which was a blow to the sensitive young man.

Reis
turned his attention to building a device to transmit sound by electricity. He
started to achieve some success, and it is noted that the first words successfully
transmitted were "the horse eats no cucumber salad". The results were
encouraging, and he submitted another article to the Journal in 1862. This was
also rejected, but it is significant in that he called his device a "Telephon"
- the first appearance of the name in connection with electrical sound transmission.
His device was based on the theories of M. Charles Bourseil, a French telegraphist,
who in 1854 suggested a device that would make or break an electrical current
under the influence of a diaphragm. The make-or-break current would then generate
a similar sound in a receiver. Bourseil stated prophetically "in a more or
less distant future, speech will be transmitted by electricity". He actually
built such a device, but found its adjustment was critical and its results inconclusive,
so he did not proceed with it.

Reis knew of the principle of the "Page
Effect", which later became known as Magnetostriction. An iron needle or
rod surrounded by a coil of wire would be moved by a variable current flowing
through the coil and produce a "tick" sound. A succession of ticks generated
a tone, which Page called "Galvanic Music". Reis used this principle
to build a basic receiver, and attached the mechanism to part of a violin to act
as a sounding board.

His transmitter was carved out of a beer barrel bung
in an approximation of the human ear. A sausage skin formed the diaphragm. A tiny
strip of platinum glued to the diaphragm acted as one electrical contact, and
another bead fixed to an adjusting screw as the other. The device worked, to everyones
amazement. It is now held in the Reichs Post-Amt Museum in Berlin. It transmitted
simple musical tones, but could not handle the complex waveforms of the human
voice. He published his results in the Jahresbericht journal in 1861 after demonstrating
it to the Physical Society of Frankfurt. It worked at the demonstration by means
of constant critical adjustment. Reis recorded that "the consonants are for
the most part tolerably distinctly reproduced, but the vowels not yet in an equal
degree".

Left: Second version, 1861

Left: Third version which briefly went into commercial pproduction by Albert. 1882.

Left: Final version, by Hauck.

Improvements followed in the second and subsequent models, but apart from
a few muffled words here and there it was never a reliable transmitter of
speech. The third and later models used a cubic block of wood bored out in
a cone shape, with the diaphragm across the top. The small platinum strip
was replaced by a centre contact held against the diaphragm by a metal tripod
spring arrangement. Sound was fed to the diaphragm by a speaking tube. It
was put into limited production by J Albert of Frankfurt and later by Hauck
of Vienna.

Despite the Telephon's less than impressive performance it was widely noticed
in scientific circles. During its production, information and copies were sent
abroad. It was demonstrated before many scientific societies, but the results
were still generally disappointing.

"...The sounds transmitted by Reis's telephone are rather weak and
muffled. Moreover they do not perfectly preserve the timbre peculiar to the
sounds imparted to the transmitter. Nevertheless they permitted differences
in quality to be observed. Professor Bohn says that in the early experiments
of 1864 the son of Privy Councillor Jhering of Giessen was found to be a better
speaker through the telephone than most other persons, and that it was easy
to distinguish the voice of a boy from that of a girl. Reis himself states that,
when chords struck on the piano were transmitted, a person having a musical
ear could in the majority of cases distinguish the various notes in the chord..."
"The fundamental ideas of Reis were based on the construction of the human
ear. He had set out with the direct intention of transmitting speech electrically,
as he states in the opening sentence of his first paper on the subject, communicated
in October 1861 to the Physical Society of Frankfurt-on-the-Maine. But he was
at first baffled by the difficulty of finding a form of apparatus that could
respond to all the various tones that are simultaneously used in speech......At
last he saw that the human ear itself solved the problem, and furnished a sort
of type of the requisite mechanism. His first experimental transmitter was therefore
an "electric ear". It is still preserved in the Patent Museum in Berlin....

From Electricity and Magnetism, by A Guillemin, published in 1891 by Macmillan,
London and New York. Chapter 7 pages 688-693.

It was only after the introduction
of Bell's telephone as a practical device that the importance of his work was
fully recognised. This was mainly as a result of the court cases that tried to
annul Bell's patent by citing Reis as the true inventor. When Antonio Meucci challenged
Bell's patent, he was able to append sixty one scientific articles citing Reis
as the inventor of the telephone.

Amos Dolbear used Reis' work to prove
the validity of his own phone. When Bell brought the inevitable patent infringement
suit, Dolbear set out to demonstrate in court that Reis' 1860 telephone worked.
This would make Bell's patent invalid. The demonstration became an embarrassing
disaster for Dolbear. Electricians, lawyers and learned Professors tried to coax
speech out the reluctant Telephon, but all they could get from it was squeaks
and muffled noises. One of Dolbear's lawyers said in frustration "It can
speak, but it won't."

Reis received some renown at this time, but
since the invention did not appear to be proceeding anywhere it was gradually
dismissed as a scientific curiosity or "philosophical toy". Again, Reis
was disappointed .

The weakness of all his models was the make-or-break nature of the circuit.
Up to a point this actually worked, as a sort of loose-contact transmitter.
As soon as the voice became loud the circuit would break and there would be
no further transmission until a return spring reestablished the contact. These
breaks destroyed the clarity of the speech, and also Reis' claim to have invented
a telephone.

Berliner later used the loose-contact principle to produce his (workable)
transmitter. The similarity between his design and Reis' is unmistakable.
The difference was that Berliner deliberately set out to use the loose-contact
principle, while Reis bypassed it and stuck doggedly to make-or-break, overlooking
the fact that his transmitter did actually work at low volume. He continued
to stress make-or-break in his documentation. It was this that cost him the
glory of being upheld as the telephone's inventor in the U.S courts. In 1881
Judge Lowell of the U.S. Circuit Court of Massachussetts ruled "The
deficiency was inherent in the principle of the machine . A century
of Reis would never have produced a speaking telephone by mere improvement
in construction". That about summed it up.

Prof. David Hughes found
that by using carbon rods he could make a microphone that worked by variable pressure,
and was far more sensitive than the Reis transmitter, but he found the same problem
as Reis and Berliner - at high volumes the circuit failed as the carbon pencils
broke contact. Berliner worked around the problem by putting an induction coil
across the circuit to maintain the contact and boost the signal.

It is
interesting to note that both Bell and Edison later acknowledged Reis' work as
part of the inspiration for their own, once the court cases had settled down.
In Britain, where Reis' work was well known, Bell's patent application was tactfully
called "Improvements In Electric Telephony and Telephonic Apparatus".

Reis' health was failing with the onset of tuberculosis. He found it difficult
to keep up his teaching duties, and work on the telephon was suspended. He died
on January 14, 1874. Reis' work and achievements were later suppressed by the
Nazis, and have only started to be acknowledged again in recent decades.

There
are some interesting footnotes to Reis' work. When the Western Union company realized
that Bell's telephone was starting to affect their revenue, they employed Edison
to develop a competing phone for them. William Orton, the president of Western
Union, gave Edison a translation of Reis' work as a starting point for his research.
Edison's first carbon phone is very similar to that of Reis' apart from Edison's
use of a carbon diaphragm. Orton later commented "I find it amusing that
Bell is perceived as the man who spent his whole fortune defending his patent
on the phone, when in fact all he did was spend his whole fortune patenting Philipp
Reis' work"

A development of Reis' phone went into commercial production for the Dakota
Emner Telephone Company and the Aberdeen Telephone Company in the U.S. in
1866. It was probably based on the second model, the most robust and simplest
to build. The little information surviving does not give much detail. The
phones were made by John Zietlow, a German immigrant, and Charles Emner, an
electrician and discharged convict turned real estate agent. The companies
were quite successful in their area, and their telephones were never challenged
legally by the Bell company. Zietlow's modifications apparently worked very
well.

The British Post Office later examined Reis' phone and concluded that with
very careful adjustment it would definitely transmit speech. Their engineers
used a stepup transformer and a modern receiver, which gave some improvement
to the Telephon's low output. The BPO carried out its examination in 1932,
and STC reexamined the transmitter in 1947. They confirmed the BPO's findings.
They did not publish their conclusions at the time as they were engaged in
negotiations with AT&T, the Bell company. Although these experiments are
interesting, they highlight the reasons the Reis Telefon did not work - a
lack of continuity in the circuit, and when it did work the signal level was
too low to be practical. In fairness, the science of coils and transformers
had barely begun and Reis would not have had the technology available to him.It
was left to other inventors like Bell and Berliner to overcome these problems
and produce a reliable workable phone.

In belated recognition of a worthy man, the Philipp Reis Prize is awarded
each two years since 1987 to a promising German inventor.